On 2/2/2013 1:27 PM, Clif Ashcraft wrote: > I just had one devil of a time getting Benjamin Britten's "Festival Te Deum" > into Finale 2012. My purpose was getting the music into a rehearsal CD for > my choir, so playback, not appearance was the first order of business. The > piece is difficult because the organ accompaniment, in a large part of the > piece, grinds along in 3/4 time playing an ornament followed by a big chord > with a slight pause after the chord. Each organ event adds up to the time it > takes to play three quarter notes. The choral part, on the other hand, is > written with a very irregular set of time signatures, 5/8, 7/8, 4/4, 3/8, > 2/4, and even an occasional 3/4. The published music has all the bar lines > lining up, but of course, as actually played they rarely do line up. > > I tried a couple of schemes to get different time signatures to apply for the > accompaniment, and some of them looked ok. None of them played ok. My final > recourse was to leave the irregular time signatures for the choir parts in > place for all of the systems and create a 3/4 time organ > gracenote/chord/pause for the first event, which I just drag copied over and > over again, changing the notes after the drag to match what Britten had > written. It looked awful, but played just fine. Occasionally the 3/4 > measures containing the chords would line up with the choir parts, but not > very often. > > Does anyone know how to convince Finale to show a different time signature > for different parts and still have it play correctly? Note that it HAS to > play correctly, appearance is secondary except that it simplifies entering > the notes, ie, I would have liked very much to have just keyed in the chords > as dotted half notes with a playable articulation for the pause rather than > the kludgy drag copy procedure I had to use which resulted in chords being > tied over bar lines with strange combinations of half note tied to quarter > notes, eighth notes tied to dotted quarter tied to quarter in the next > measure, etc. >
This has been a long-standing complaint about Finale (and Sibelius) while you can have independent time signatures in different staves, the barlines always line up and each measure in the different staves occupies the same time, so a 3/4 measure in one staff takes the same amount of time as a 4/4 measure in the same place on a different staff. The workaround is to figure out the largest common denominator for all the different time signatures to figure out where they overlap and then set that as the time signature for all staves and put in the differing time signatures and barlines as graphics. So if you've got 3/4 in some staves and 4/4 in other staves, you set the time signature to be 12/4 and then all the beats will line up. With more widely divergent meters the measures get larger and larger. For some it's nearly impossible to do what you want. Since appearance isn't important you can enter the easiest staves first and then simply do the mental math to calculate ties and rhythms to get the notes to line up properly. -- David H. Bailey dhbai...@davidbaileymusicstudio.com _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
